That seem’d a lifetime ago, and we thought that arrre captain had given’ up the dream of go’in after thar sea creatures, for they be very laaaaarge and mute and not so easy to teach about the concepts of efficient uses of in-kind aid and the proper representation of NGO overheads (whare I come from, NGO stands for “Not Going Overboard”).

I had figur’d that we’d be heading back to dry land, whare we could get away from the tricky business of chasin’ around them mighty mastodons, fellin’ them one by one in an attempt to induce good behaviaaaar. Maybe we could instead think about slapping them with a tax of 100 pieces of gold for every shaart they send, or providing them with some other kind of direct incentive to behave correctly, rather than spinnin us in circles trying to be a winnin’ some grand argument.

Yet me hopes were dashed when, when we ware nearly back to port, the first mate Starbuck Schimmelpfennig spotted that all-destroying but unconquering whale, goes by the name of World Vision, for some reason dressed head to flipper in Pittsburgh Steelers t-shirts. I was a’hoping that cooler heads would be prevailing, and for a while things seem’d pretty quiet aboard the Tweetquod and the Blogosphaaar, but then the first mate just said that was because we were all a’scaaaaared of that thaaaar whale.

And I had been thinking that we were quiet because maybe the crew was gettin’ tired of chasing them whales, or maybe because thaaar be bigger fish to fry, but then them haaarpoons started being thrown from all directions. Even them haarpooners over at the blog run by Parseasterly, who casts a shadow over all others, couldn’t resist letting loose into at the whale of an NGO.

But the great Christian leviathan just flipped and flapped and sank beneath the sea over thar, and a great call went above deck to give chase. And I thought: maybe I could be wrong (and I most certainly have been before), but maybe it’s time we tried a different approach.